[HN Gopher] Lessons from building nine startups in 2023
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Lessons from building nine startups in 2023
Author : marclou
Score : 111 points
Date : 2024-01-07 10:34 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (marclou.beehiiv.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (marclou.beehiiv.com)
| marclou wrote:
| OP here. I call my products startups because I need to believe
| each will make $ at some point, otherwise, I wouldn't have been
| able to grind for 6 years.
|
| Some are actual startups with decent userbase and recurring
| revenue, and some are just free logo makers.
| sureglymop wrote:
| Why is it so much about $? What about just creating something
| out of passion and curiosity? Do you have projects like that at
| all (maybe even ones that were not shared with the world)?
| Sirizarry wrote:
| I like programming but not as much as I like other hobbies.
| If I'm not making money in some capacity from programming,
| then I just go do something else that I enjoy more. Money is
| a strong motivator and for most people, it is stronger than
| passion and curiosity because those don't put food on my
| table.
| tsp wrote:
| If you don't have a full-time job that generates income, you
| better think of ways to monetize your side-projects.
| Completely different story when you have stable income.
| marclou wrote:
| Mostly because I lived with $1k/mo for 5 years
|
| But I also created lots of hobby projects like
| https://mood2movie.com/ https://bookscalculator.com/
| https://50hacks.co/ https://naval25.com/
| https://decisiongame.co/ https://buddycrush.co/
|
| All my projects are here: https://marclou.com/
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| 6 years, wow! Admire your ability to keep at it.
| darod wrote:
| I appreciate the grit but don't align with the definition. One
| could argue that you made 1 startup with several products and
| the most successful one would be what you pivot to.
| em-bee wrote:
| yes, when i look at https://indiepa.ge/ for example, it lists
| people with 21 startups, 15 startups, 10 startups... it gave
| me a wierd feeling. it seems so out of place and unrealistic.
|
| if instead it would say: 21 products, 15 products, 10
| products... the list would look much more sensible.
| milesvp wrote:
| Back in 2006, I knew a lot of people who used to call any
| webpage with a potential product a startup. There was one
| group I was associated with who did a biweekly "8hour
| startup" day. The idea was you'd come together for the day,
| form groups of 2-4 people and work on getting a finished
| website where you could sell something. Think a game jam
| equivalent for web devs/PMs. Was kind of fun. I did it
| once, though usually I was working on other things when
| these events were going on, and could rarely commit to the
| length of the events.
| blitzar wrote:
| Ahh the SV grindset.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| A startup is a business, not a product. If you really created
| nine separate legal entities and file taxes separately for all
| nine, so be it, I guess this is nine startups. That seems like
| a bizarrely inefficient way to work, though. One startup that
| creates nine products makes more sense to me.
| arjonagelhout wrote:
| I admire your work ethic and perseverance. One thing I personally
| learned from trying to build a startup this way, is that the
| problems you're building a solution for become very narrow as
| your main source of inspiration becomes startup culture and
| digital SaaS products.
|
| I made the decision to first get real work experience in a
| relevant industry, learn the problems there and only then start
| building a product. This opens up the door to building software
| for industries like the AEC industry, defense or healthcare,
| where you could have far greater impact, instead of getting stuck
| on building todo apps, online communities or platforms.
| marclou wrote:
| 100% with you.
|
| It's so hard to find real problems if you spend 90% of your
| time finding problems.
|
| Having a job is a great fix.
|
| Building side projects with no purpose works too.
|
| For instance, you can sell a boilerplate to make it faster, or
| get feedback from users and build for them.
|
| Although it's much harder to start, and hard to navigate life
| without $ for months (years in my case)
| TheLastSultan wrote:
| The way I see it for you Marc, you spent 6 years building an
| audience on Twitter. Shipfa.st has a very short shelf life.
| The audience and trust of startup founders/lovers in the
| ecosystem has lasting value.
|
| Any ideas on how to capitalize on that?
| marclou wrote:
| Good point.
|
| Either I'll build an audience on YouTube
|
| And/Or I'll build new startups
|
| Also, my Twitter is really small so there's much more work
| to do there.
|
| Any thoughts?
|
| Note: I've been building an audience there for 2 years (the
| first 4 years was me building in the dark)
| TheLastSultan wrote:
| I think if you can focus on making informative content
| for YT at the same quality as your commercials it will be
| a smashing success. The key is focus. You have an
| eccentric charm that devs like myself enjoy. Your Twitter
| following will help you get from 0 to 1 there, but you
| should still be prepared for a steep curve before it
| generates revenue.
|
| I do have a radical idea that I am keen to share with you
| in particular.
|
| I am the Founder of RocketDevs.com. The 'amazing' thing
| about us is that we can ethically and reliably source
| GREAT developers and rent them out for $6/hr or $980/mo.
| This entry point is cheap for USD earners, but stil a
| fortune in some regions.
|
| The market opportunity here is early startups. People
| have ideas, but they can't spend $7k/mo on Turing. Fivver
| is shit. Upwork is avg $28/hr for mid-devs. With no
| affordable help, non-technical founders will scramble to
| find a 'technical' founder. You taught yourself how to
| code but few are that committed. Technical founders will
| reliably start a project and burn out quickly due to 0
| help.
|
| Our audiences intersect strongly. My radical idea is that
| we work together. I use my deep technical experience to
| source great devs. You use your following so I can
| conveniently focus on the product and avoid the pain of
| 'building an audience' just to get the word out. Stable
| income for you and we're helping folks build their
| dreams.
|
| Look me up at linkedin.com/in/thelastsultan if you're
| keen. I think im in your inbox already.
| marclou wrote:
| Got it, chatting there!
| iamleppert wrote:
| How do you find developers for $6/hr and what do you mean
| you rent them out?
| ametrau wrote:
| Yeah. Which country I would very much like to know. 100%
| exploitation.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > It's so hard to find real problems if you spend 90% of your
| time finding problems.
|
| > Having a job is a great fix.
|
| My experience differs: it is very easy to find real problems,
| and it is possible to implement a decent solution for at
| least some of them. But: many of the problems that various
| industries have are in my opinion self-inflicted because of
| their structures. What is hard is convincing potential
| customers that your solution would help them.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| Once it hurts enough, people pull out their wallets.
|
| What's that threshold? Well, that's the hard part. :)
| wharvle wrote:
| Example: the entire software industry (to include, and
| perhaps especially, companies that develop software but
| aren't exactly software companies) seems to have a problem
| with splitting tools across a bunch of vendors, many of
| which have heavily overlapping functionality. It adds
| friction to everything and makes it harder to see what's
| going on, burning god knows how much productivity.
|
| But you can't fix it by making another multifunctional
| tool, because you'll just get people using one or two of
| your five feature-areas, and two or three other tools for
| the rest, same as now.
| askafriend wrote:
| > seems to have a problem with splitting tools across a
| bunch of vendors
|
| Why is this a problem?
| wharvle wrote:
| Adds a little overhead and friction to processes. Causes
| miscommunication and lost and scattered info, and worse
| visibility and awareness of what's going on than could be
| achieved. The result is fairly significant rarely-
| accounted-for costs. I've seen it _every_ place I've
| worked.
|
| Of course "well just use all the tools the right way and
| always look where you're supposed to and put things in
| the right place" but it never works out so nicely in
| practice.
|
| [edit] example: paying for a half dozen services that
| provide, between them, two code repo hosting solutions,
| four CI solutions, six wiki solutions (LOL), two cloud
| hosting solutions, two CDNs, three issue trackers, and on
| and on... and mixing and matching those such that it
| requires daily manual upkeep to synchronize info between
| them (you're not using all the features of each one, to
| be clear--or, if you're really in hell, maybe you are),
| onboarding is messier than it could be, account
| management is a pain, you're over-paying at least a bit
| on everything, "where did/does that go?" is a constant
| question, everyone needs several pinned tabs opened when
| they could have, like, two, et c et c. Usually the
| reasons for doing this aren't even strong, it's just how
| things have ended up.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| > many of the problems that various industries have are in
| my opinion self-inflicted because of their structures.
|
| I would bet my entire salary you only believe this because
| you don't understand the constraints. When I was in my 20's
| and thought I knew everything I had the same attitude. I
| have since gained seniorship and worked in regulated
| industries and it's much clearer to me now. People in the
| industries you're talking about are generally smart and
| well meaning, but the constraints imposed by things like
| regulation and legacy systems (internal and external) make
| things that seem like they should be easy really hard.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > I would bet my entire salary you only believe this
| because you don't understand the constraints.
|
| I would counter bet that:
|
| i) I do know quite some of the constraints (though surely
| not all).
|
| ii) Quite of these these constraints are self-imposed
| prisons that the respective company/industry created for
| itself because of historical or "political" reasons.
|
| What you call "constraints" is something that I would
| rather call "the industry's preferred flavor". Well, I do
| have a different taste than the respective industry. :-)
|
| Believe me: In the past, when I was frustrated of my job,
| I made use of an opportunity to present some ideas that I
| had to some former friend who has been working in
| business consulting for many years: he really told me
| that some my ideas could be as impactful for the
| respective industries as I imagine it, but they would be
| insanely hard to sell (and a huge part of _his_ job _is_
| selling things to customers) because they so different.
|
| To give an even different perspective: at my current
| emplyer's Christmas party, my boss' boss said that I am
| the kind of person who cannot be classified on an
| optimist-pessimist scale, since I don't behave like an
| optimist or pessimist, but rather like an statistical
| outlier in a data set. :-)
| throwaway_108 wrote:
| Any startups, in your view, nailing your advice?
| StreetChief wrote:
| I'm curious if the author has ever been in therapy. I would never
| say food + sleep + exercise is a substitute for professional
| medical advice.
| jb1991 wrote:
| It's obviously hyperbole. It makes a point about how to improve
| your mental health by taking care of your physical health.
| Uptrenda wrote:
| There's quite a lot of truth to it though.
|
| Exercise (the right kind) has comparable effects to anti-
| depressants. It can help people with very hard to treat
| depression manage symptoms. It improves cognition and induces
| neurogenesis.
|
| Sleep. It's quite a curious fact but after a person experiences
| sleep deprivation their dopamine and serotonin levels spike.
| It's been noted that this helps with depression. Psychiatrists
| have observed the relationship between sleep and mental health
| and used sleep modulation to treat bipolar. They call it triple
| chrono therapy 'sleep deprivation for 36 h, followed by 4 days
| of advancing the time of sleep and daily morning bright-light
| therapy for 6 months) has demonstrated benefits for the rapid
| treatment of depressive symptom.'
|
| So that's an interesting example of using sleep as a way to
| treat illness. The more common knowledge is that having poor
| sleep negatively effects mood and cognition. If you look at so-
| called 'biohackers' the number one thing they seem to emphasize
| is sleep. Because if you have poor sleep it's infinitely harder
| to manage every other aspect of your life. Never mind
| exercising or eating well. You're not going to feel like doing
| anything.
|
| The last one -- diet. In those with mental disorders its
| interesting to note that the prevalence of nutrition
| deficiencies is much higher than the general population. I've
| seen some interesting takes on the potential role that
| nutrition may play in mental health. There are some that say
| that some of these illnesses may be caused by potential issues
| with absorbing nutrients. While others say that specific diets
| have managed to cure seemingly incurable disorders. There does
| seem to be evidence of direct dietary ties as a kind of
| treatment for mental disorders. One of the most important
| medications in psychiatry, lithium, might also be an essential
| micronutrient.
|
| It seems the more we understand about diet, sleep, and
| exercise, the more important they actually become for
| maintaining mental health. Though the specifics do matter.
| agubelu wrote:
| What would be the "wrong" kind of exercise?
| reaperman wrote:
| Something that injures you. But also any long-term routine
| that lacks an aerobic component. Aerobic aspects of
| exercise are particularly important for most of the mental
| health benefits[0].
|
| 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurobiological_effects_of
| _phy...
| paxys wrote:
| Physical health is important to mental health. Yes "eat better"
| and "sleep more" is terrible advice for someone who is
| clinically depressed, but I'd wager that these basic habits
| will measurably improve the life of most people reading this.
| ebiester wrote:
| This is for a different audience.
|
| A gap in food, sleep, or exercise in someone who has no pre-
| existing mental health problems will reduce productivity and
| can induce or exacerbate a mental health decline. Founders tend
| to start skipping these and it's a good reminder that these are
| important.
|
| People with pre-existing mental health problems should
| absolutely look to food, sleep, and exercise to prevent
| exacerbating their problems, but this is not sufficient.
| Uptrenda wrote:
| When you build these type of projects is there an actual
| consistent method to getting people to look at your work? Because
| from my experience it seems like any amount of feedback I've had
| came from freak lottery type events like getting covered in a
| magazine or something like that.
|
| How would someone who is really clueless and horrible at
| promotion learn those kind of skills?
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| There's Show HN, ProductHunt, meetups, connections (which you
| can get through meetups), pitching events/contests,
| sponsorships, influencers...
|
| Part of it may come from designing the product to help with the
| marketing. That may also help with viral marketing.
|
| Marketing is a pretty broad topic, and it can vary a lot, too.
| Maybe it's a good idea to talk to some of your customers face
| to face to learn more about their industry vertical. If you
| share some specifics, maybe more people here could suggest
| ideas.
| zachthewf wrote:
| Good way to start is to force yourself to post (as yourself,
| ideally with your work) on the internet every day
| gnicholas wrote:
| There is a lot of luck involved in posting on the internet, for
| sure. I posted a Show HN one time that ended up on the front
| page for over a day, with half of that time at #1. That led to
| media coverage all over the world.
|
| Another Show HN I posted went nowhere -- even though it was a
| good enough idea to separately get media coverage because it
| was timely (including in a front-page article of the NYT).
| There is a lot of luck involved, but you can also make your own
| luck, by reaching out to folks who might be interested.
| thih9 wrote:
| While helpful, it is at the same time a content marketing piece,
| going a bit meta.
|
| It might not be as objective; the author benefits from people who
| take this advice and decide to try one of the advertised
| products.
| j4yav wrote:
| Why go through all the trouble of creating nine startups when you
| could have made one startup with nine products and saved yourself
| an ungodly amount of paperwork?
| w10-1 wrote:
| Great stuff:
|
| - Brief. Respect people's time, and take a stand.
|
| - Tailored, to solopreneur. It's tempting to be drawn into
| building beautiful tech, chasing resume skills, or building
| domain experience in crap work. Putting yourself on the hook of
| your own decision-making builds character.
|
| - Refined: it's easy to go from bad to good (just smooth out the
| pain points). It's very hard to go from good (happy but free
| customers) to better (paying customers), because you're trading
| lots of pain for benefits.
|
| - Timely: those are the virtues of 2023, of contraction (outside
| AI-mania), where you control your destiny as a solopreneur. If it
| starts raining money again, it might not be the right approach.
|
| However, the most common measure of leadership is a success
| pattern in ... leadership. People can take solopreneur experience
| as fitting for product management and not much else.
|
| To show leadership, you have to demonstrate decision-making under
| stress, where you identified the key factors and how to change
| them. That's a different post, one that shows how you sift
| through noise, excitement, and gaps to find the difference that
| makes a difference, and prosecute that.
|
| It's possible solopreneurs can get rich, but more often success
| means finding partners, get attention or getting bought, or just
| proving yourself - to yourself and perhaps others.
|
| Or, if you're really lucky, you can make a difference.
| purple-leafy wrote:
| I'm in the same boat as the OP, I've launched 3 projects in 2023.
|
| I spent 10 months on the first project. It was a very clever
| project, complicated to explain, hard to build, and ultimately
| did crap. It scratched my own itch - or so I thought, I don't
| even use it myself at all. No emotions, pure logic marketing.
| 1000+ users only. $0 made.
|
| My second project I built in 1 day, and launched in 1 week. It
| was basic, but people wanted this functionality. It was an
| emotion based marketing, people empowerment tool, and I wanted it
| and I use it myself. It immediately went viral and I managed to
| sell it for a decent bump to my income. 5 figures.
|
| My third project I built in 3 days, it was the top post of the
| month on the subreddit for the niche, and gained about 1500 users
| in 1 day. Again, an emotional marketing spin and this time worker
| empowerment. I'm planning on selling it this year for 4 figures.
|
| I'm now working on a roughly 2-3 month project from start to
| launch. It's something I need. It will be my first non-freemium
| project.
|
| Lessons learned? Build FAST, and market an mvp as soon as you
| can. Be clever, but not too clever because you only alienate a
| potential audience. I really agree with the OP regarding
| impressions and emotions. I will only pursue ideas I can build
| and fully launch in a 3 month window.
|
| How can I improve? Get the landing page up earlier, don't be too
| clever with ideas, and try paid advertisements
| chpmrc wrote:
| I've been following you (among other indie hackers) for a couple
| of years. I respect and admire the heck out of what you're doing.
| But I have a huge problem with the fact that you keep referring
| to the income brought in by ShipFa.st (again, heck of a product!)
| as "51K/m" (as of today this is what your X's bio shows), when
| pricing is obviously not recurring.
|
| What would be a lot more indicative of the financial success of
| the project (and less misleading) would be something like
| "trailing 3 months". But I get it: telling the world you're
| making $X/mo is a blast. And it definitely helps with exposure!
| But IMO it gives off guru vibes, especially when paired with the
| fact that you seem to be veering towards paid educational content
| (nothing bad with that obviously).
|
| I wouldn't even bother writing this if it wasn't for the fact
| that you literally open with the line "my income jumped from
| $1,500 in January, to $65,000 in November", of which $50k is
| definitely not recurring.
|
| (Again, not a hater, quite the opposite so I hope you take this
| as constructive feedback!)
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